In a resolution adopted on a 125-to-4 vote by the APA’s governing council, and in a comprehensive report based on two years of research, the 150,000-member association put itself firmly on record in opposition of so-called “reparative therapy” which seeks to change sexual orientation.

No solid evidence exists that such change is likely, says the report, and some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.

Some validation for something I could have told you years ago. I heard a rumor that you can’t get the black out of people either. What is this world coming to?

A recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that 75% of respondents in Arkansas and Alabama think the Bible is literally true. West Virginia came in at 70% and Tennessee at 68%.

In Vermont and Massachusetts evidently only 22% are complete whack-jobs.

I would like to think that these numbers only reflect the amount of people who regularly misuse (and therefore have forgotten the definition of) the word ‘literally’. Maybe when asked if they think the Bible is literally true they thought it was being used in the same way as when I say I’m going to literally kill myself because so many Americans are sheep (and stupid sheep at that).

Salon has a great piece about the somewhat more than sketchy health articles on the Huffington Post.

I get a lot of news from the Huffington Post. It is even my homepage on my computer. But I’ve also learned never to venture into the “Living” section – as it is full of almost nothing but metaphysical homeopathic bullshit.

While I admit that the drug companies have too much pull over health-care in this country, I also know that they are not ones to turn down a profit. The drug companies are not engaged in a conspiracy in which they convince the American people that only their drugs work for any given illness. If drinking wormwood tea made cancer go away they wouldn’t try to cover it up, they would try to sell it.

I often hear people say we just need to give homeopathy a chance – that we are too biased to traditional western medicine. What they don’t understand is that we did give alternative treatments a chance. We gave all treatments a chance, and those that worked became medicine and those that didn’t became “alternative medicine”.

The scientific method applies the same to western medicine as it applies to gravity or to the nature of matter. Just because you want Aloe Vera Gel to cure your arthritis doesn’t mean it will. Either accept everything that the scientific method gives us or accept none of it. If you pick and choose than you undermine it’s very usefulness as a system.

The government is spending an increasing amount of money by investigating the legitimacy of so-called alternative medicine. And so far all they’ve found is that they are simply an alternative to effective. And yet they through more money down the well.

Like the family that was recently held responsible for the death of their child (for not taking her to the hospital in lieu of prayer) people put themselves and others at risk when they turn away from western medicine.

Our culture’s growing appetite for natural and organic foods cannot be allowed to spread to far. Soon there will be a movement against penicillin and the very plastic that makes the syringes that carry it.

Our intellects enable us to create things from other things – it is why we’re on the top of the food chain, it is what makes us human. Homeopathy is a move away from progress, from evolution. It is a move to simpler times, with simple remedies, simple sickness, and simple death.

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

This is a very interesting and frightening article by Jeffrey Toobin, exploring John Roberts’ career so far as Chief Justice. It’s a thoughtful article about Roberts and well worth the read.

Today is the National Day of Prayer– that glorious day where all pretenses of state keeping separate from religion are destroyed and we can all get together and do something we would all be doing anyway.

Unless of course you are non-religious – in which case this day is actually kind of offensive in the civil liberties violating kind of way.